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Let's forget for a minute about the growing Google scandal . Let's forget the kickback scandal unearthed by the ANA. Instead, let's go back to first principles and focus on the nature of online advertising, and why - at its core - it has become a corrupt and dangerous thing. It all started with a big fantasy. The fantasy was this -- people would want to interact with online advertising. We were told that online advertising would be far more effective than traditional advertising because it would be interactive . This fantasy lived for a few years until reliable data arrived and it became clear that consumers had virtually no interest in interacting with online advertising. In fact, click rates (the only possible way to interact with online advertising) were so low, platforms like Facebook refused to divulge them. There are two ways online publishers make money - traffic and clicks. In light of the indifference consumers were demonstrating toward display advertising, publis...

Adidas made some headlines this week when their new-ish ceo announced that they were no longer going to use television advertising and were going to put all their advertising money online. The purpose of this move, according to the ceo, was to quadruple online sales in the next 3 years. A few thoughts: First, this doesn't sound like a change in ad strategy as much as a change in business strategy.  "All of our engagement with the consumer is through digital media and we believe in the next three years we can take our online business from approximately 1 billion (euro) to 4 billion (euro) and create a much more direct engagement with consumers."   From this language, it sounds like Adidas is switching from a typical retail sales strategy to an online direct response strategy. The only problem is, from numbers I've been able to dig up, only 6% of their sales are online. Adidas annual sales are about $17b, about $1b of which is the result of e-commerce. The risk-rew...

When I'm shooting my mouth off at some conference the question I get most frequently is this, "What's the future of advertising?" I have no fucking idea what's going to happen 10 minutes from now, how the hell am I supposed to know what's going to happen "in the future," whenever the hell that is? For all I know, someday someone might click on a banner ad. Who knows? But conference goers and press reporters can't help asking that question. They've been trained to do this by marketing yappers. You see, marketing gurus are usually so confused by all the horseshit generated by their industry that they can't even figure out what's happening now . So they've learned to hide in the future. The great thing about talking about the future is that you don't have to know anything. You just make shit up and nobody can refute it. And when the future comes, who's going to remember the baloney you predicted 10 years ago? Meanwhile you ma...

A coalition of advertising trade associations joined the Trump administration yesterday in calling for the rejection of an FCC regulation created to protect consumers by restricting the collection and sharing of personal information by internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T. The regulation would have given consumers far more control over their personal information by requiring them to opt-in before the ISPs could use or sell their personal information. The actions of the advertising industry in this instance are deplorable -- but hardly surprising. The ad industry is losing its grip. We can't control ourselves. Jonathan Schwantes of the Consumers Union has said,  "Consumers deserve to know—and have a say in—who is collecting certain information about them and how it’s used." Listen to this bullshit from the 4A's, AAF, ANA, DMA and IAB... "Without prompt action in Congress or at the FCC, the FCC's regulations would break with well-accepted an...

This is one of those blog posts you write when you’re on a transatlantic overnight flight and you haven't slept a fucking wink and you’re groggy from taking way too many drugs that aren't doing shit. But you have to be alert when you land because you have all kinds of obligations that you foolishly agreed to when you imagined a pleasant flight with kindly air hostesses pouring champagne, and a gentle few hours of nocturnal reverie, instead of a smelly dark cabin with the faint aroma of fresh-squeezed urine emanating from every closed door. Yeah, one of those posts. So if I get a few details wrong, like what decade I’m talking about, I don’t want any shit from you people. Please click this button if you agree to our terms. So while I was not sleeping, I was thinking that every decade I worked in the ad business there was always a miracle that was going to make advertising finally reputable, orderly and grown up. A real honest-to-god business with predictable and reliable outco...

I was interviewed recently on " Marketing Today. " The topic of the interview is the state of the agency world. Here is the interview.

If we had access to the internal financials of WPP, IPG, Omnicom, Publicis and Dentsu, here's what I think we would find. We would find that in the past decade they have invested heavily in technology, data and analytics and not at all in creativity. In fact, I would bet the farm that in each of these holding companies the proportion of salary devoted to the creative area has dropped in the past decade. The financiers, accountants, investors, and Wall Street wise guys who now control the ad business are betting on the wrong horse. There is only one element of marketing at which agencies have an advantage over other suppliers -- creativity. Consultants can provide clients with better strategy; data and analytics companies can provide clients with better numbers; "martech" companies can provide better technology services. But no one can provide better creative ideas. And yet agencies -- who are always telling clients that they need to differentiate -- are de-emphasizing the...

A few months ago I was contacted by one of the world's largest marketing companies. No names. They were instituting a review of several brands and wanted my advice on how to properly conduct a review. I spoke to the global head of this and the worldwide head of that. I gave them my advice in one sentence. Look for the agencies that make the best ads. All the rest is trivial. Marketing today is a battle to be noticed. There is so much of it. It is so loud and so relentless. There are so many ways to throw money away. But the worst way to throw money away is by doing invisible advertising. What is invisible advertising? It is advertising that looks, sounds, and smells like everyone else's advertising. It has no impact and leaves no trail. It appears and disappears in a second. It is a total waste of money. We have become so focused on irrelevancies that we have forgotten the first principal of advertising -- it doesn't matter how well you sing if no one hears you. Here are so...